My volume control is missing/doesnt work! Need help!

[Sketcz]

The volume control on the little bar at the bottom of my screen is gone.
When I try and select the volume control option from my programs list, I click on it, a little hourglass pops up onto the pointer, then it stops and no volume control pops up.

I can change volume basically. One of the icons is missing, and the others dont work.

Ive tried rebooting my PC a few times, nothing.

I was fooling around in DOS the other day, trying to some old game to have sound, all with no luck. So I left everything as default and left it.
But now the volume has been left very high, and I cant lower it.

Why wont it work?
I never actually changed the settings of my sound card.

SPECS:
win98
128mb ram
Aurial Vortex Soundcard

Any help?
Thanks in advance.

EDIT:
I dont have speakers attatched. To save space, I did away with them completely and now only use a small pair of headphones. Had it like this for 6 months with no problems.

[marcus]

In case this has been overlooked - Start Settings Control Panel/Sounds and audio devices, and tick "place volume control in task bar". If its not that, let us know.

[Sketcz]

I checked and it was ticked. The wierd thing being that you should normally be able to select volume control from that panel, but it didnt work.

Anyway I found out what the problem was.
Under the multimedia section, when I was fooling around, I must have accidently changed the "playback" settings to "use any available device"

A quick switch back to using my dedicated "Aurial Vortex AU8830 playback" device set things right.

boy, do I feel sheepish now for such a small mistake. >_<
Should have continued to look deeper.

Cheers for pointing me in the right direction

[SpudNuts]

I had that problem with my old Creative Audigy card, turns out it was using the same IRQ number as my onboard Giga-Raid controller.


I was advised to take the card out and put it in a different PCI slot, but then of course, re-installing the drivers also worked.